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Fig trees may benefit climate by turning carbon dioxide into stone
Fig trees may benefit climate by turning carbon dioxide into stone
'Humanity’s time is over!’ Apple TV+ drops release date and intense first teaser for 'Invasion' Season 3
For 100 years, we have marveled at planetariums. Here's a brief history of how humans brought the stars indoors
Devour a cosmic-sized chunk of Marvel lore ahead of 'The Fantastic Four: First Steps', with the 'The Coming of Galactus' novel
Rare snowfall in Atacama Desert forces the world's most powerful radio telescope into 'survival mode'
A 'Golden Handle' will appear on the moon tonight. Here's how to see it
Space Park Leicester and the ESA are Building a Lab that Could House Extraterrestrial Samples Someday
Will YR4 Hit the Moon? We Won't Know Until 2028
Earlier this year, asteroid 2024 YR4 was discovered and found to have a trajectory through the Earth/Moon system in 2032. The world's telescopes focused on the potential threat and downgraded the chance to negligible for the Earth...but it still has a non-zero chance of hitting the Moon. As the asteroid became too dim to continue observing, its Moon impact chance stood at 4%. When will we update this number? Not until it does another close flyby in 2028.
Old Hubble Space Telescope Photos Unlock the Secret of a Rogue Planet
Astronomers have made a breakthrough by using 25 year old Hubble images to investigate a potential "rogue planet" drifting through space without a host star. When a brief gravitational microlensing event occurred in 2023, researchers discovered Hubble had photographed the same location in 1997, creating an unprecedented quarter century baseline. Finding no stellar companion in the archival data strengthened evidence for a rogue planet with mass between Earth and Saturn, demonstrating the scientific value of space telescope archives for studying these elusive worlds wandering the Galaxy alone.
Machine Learning is Surprisingly Good at Simulating the Universe
Some of the most powerful supercomputers in the world are designed to simulate complex astrophysical processes, like what's happening inside a giant star as it's going supernova. But researchers have developed a new machine learning algorithm that was able to accurately simulate galaxy evolution with fewer computer resources and dramatically more quickly than a supercomputer, which could take years to fully process.
If Dark Energy is Decreasing, is the Big Crunch Back on the Menu?
Astronomers once wondered if the Universe might one day collapse in on itself in a Big Crunch, but the discovery of dark energy suggested that the expansion of the Universe would accelerate, removing that possibility. New data from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument suggests that dark energy might be changing in strength over time, maybe even going negative. If that result holds, are we due for a Big Crunch? And how long would it take?
High-Speed Gas Clouds Fuel Star Formation in Depleted Galaxies
How do galaxies like ours continue producing stars long after they should have used up their star-forming gas. Somehow, an external gas source must find its way into the galaxy. New research has found evidence of gas clouds that found their way into a spiral galaxy, likely fueling continued star formation.